June Links & Things

This is my monthly wrap-up of June's Links & Things. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern. Note, however, that not all of my tweeted links make it into these month-end posts. Previous month-end posts are accessible via the "Links and Things" tag in the right column.

June was a very busy month, for whatever reason; one would think that the online chatter would have lessened, what with vacations and such, but that wasn't the case. So, I'll be doing a bit less editorializing in order to get through this list.

• Mark Teppo's (@markteppo) novels, Lightbreaker and Heartland -- books 1 and 2 in the Codex of Souls series -- are currently available for the Kindle for 99-cents each. I don't know how long this rate will last, but I would encourage Kindle readers to take advantage of this special. You can read more about my editorial involvement in these two books here (which also includes excerpts from reviews). Mark has informed me that he is now hard at work on book 3, Angel Tongue.

• I also wanted to share with readers the passing of anthologist Martin (Marty) H. Greenberg, whose Tekno Books was instrumental in my co-edited anthology Is Anybody Out There? being published by Daw Books last year. I first learned of Marty's death via tweets from Bill Crider (@macavityabc) and @LawrenceBlock. io9 has this obit.

• I attended Westercon 64 this weekend and on more than one occasion, and in multiple panels, Ralan's Market Report and Webstravaganza was discussed. If you are a writer -- novice or pro -- looking for available markets, and/or the current status of existing markets, then Ralan.com is where you need to go. And sign up for the e-newsletter, too; the July 5 newsletter has just dropped into my Inbox. I'm shocked with my own self that I haven't mentioned Ralan previously (or, at least, I don't recall having ever done so; shame on me).

• I've just learned of a couple new markets: 1) BayCon, the San Francisco Bay Area's regional convention, will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2012. Beginning in 2012, BayCon will begin publishing one original short story and one original flash fiction piece in the program book. This market is aimed at newer writers. Guidelines (via @CandlemarkGleam and @deirdresm); 2) The Galaxy Project: a "contest to select one novella or novelette [to] be judged in the spirit of H. L. Gold and the great magazine of which he was founding editor." Guidelines (via @sfsignal).

• And with story submissions come story rejections, unfortunately. Former lit agent, now author, Nathan Bransford blogs that "Rejection Is Not Personal" even though it feels personal.

August Links & Things (Part Two)

Part Two of my "August Links & Things" blog post is of a more personal nature, primarily on authors with whom I have worked, books I have edited. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern -- but here, in addition to the links themselves, I include more detail and occasional comments.

• RTBookReviews.com [Romantic Times] has "Kage Baker Remembered" -- heartfelt memories of the author as seen "through the eyes of her younger sister, Kathleen Bartholomew." I would like to add that in all the years I've known Kage -- and through lunches, dinners, bookstore readings, convention panels, hotel lobby chats, etc. -- she and Kathleen were inseparable. Reading about Kage through Kathleen's eyes is a pure joy. [Note: I have written my own remembrance of working with Kage Baker.]

Kage, age 6, with her first typewriter,
and her godfather, Irish actor Sean McClory

• And if you are a reader and/or fan of Kage's writings, then you'll want to be following Kathleen's blog: Kathleen, Kage and the Company, in which Kathleen is -- to use her word -- "channeling" Kage. In between her fiction writing, Kathleen tells many wonderful stories of growing up with Kage, the two of them living together in various locales, their travels, their hobbies, the food they loved, and more. Kathleen has tons of Kage's notes, and years and years of long discussions with Kage about her stories and characters -- and Kathleen plans to write the novels that Kage was unable to complete. She is currently working on the sequel to The Women of Nell Gwynne's.
  

March Links & Things

Following are my links and such for the month of March. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail and comment (and the occasional rant). You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• If you haven't surmised by now, I am a freelance editor; my wife is also self-employed. When our health care premium topped over $1,100 per month -- more than $13,200 a year (and that was 2 years ago!) -- we had to abandon that plan and go with an HSA plan with a high deductible. So you won't be hearing any complaining from me about health care reform; in fact, I'm truly saddened there is no public option: that was the only way to force some real competition among the private health care providers, who whine about rising costs as they give multi-million-dollar bonuses to their CEOs.
  
  I bring this to your attention because of a blog post by award-winning author George R. R. Martin, who speaks from the heart on health care and its impact on freelance writers: himself and his close friends. "It is worth pointing out that if either of my friends had lived in Canada, or Australia, or France, or England, or any country with that old vile 'socialized medicine' the right wing likes to denounce, they would never have gotten so sick. They would have seen a doctor much earlier, early enough so that their medical problems could have been diagnosed, treated, and perhaps cured or ameliorated before they required major surgery. But no, they couldn't afford doctors, and they didn't feel THAT bad... not at first... so they did what millions of Americans have done, and ignored their symptoms until it was almost too late."
  
  If you are a freelancer, if you are self-employed, and you have health care coverage -- even what is termed "catastrophic coverage" -- consider yourself very, very lucky indeed.



• In my February Links & Things, I talked about Paul Williams, former editor of Crawdaddy, former head of the Philip K. Dick Society, author of the Bob Dylan: Performing Artist series, and all-around great guy; and I linked to an article about Paul's current illness: early-onset dementia. As a follow-up to that entry, author Paul Di Filippo has an article on BarnesandNobleReview.com in which he discusses the significance of the Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (12 volumes to date), all of which have been edited by Paul Williams. The final volume, entitled Case and the Dreamer, is scheduled to be published this October. Paul Di Filippo expresses concern that Paul Williams "might already be beyond the point where any kudos can reliably reach him." It's a well-done, albeit short article highlighting the significance of Sturgeon's short fiction, and this 13-volume series in particular. I have all 12 volumes in my library, and am eagerly awaiting the final volume in October.



• Author Mark Teppo (@MarkTeppo) is in the news a lot these days to promote Heartland (Night Shade Books), book two in his Codex of Souls. You can read my previous blog about working with Mark on the first two books in this series.
  
  Mark has two entries on Amazonblogs's Omnivoracious, hosted by Jeff VanderMeer. In the first, on "The Nature of Magick," Mark writes: "I love the idea of secret knowledge, and when you strip away all the pomp and circumstance surrounding most modern religious practices, what remains is an unshakable faith in a secret." The second entry is entitled "On the Existence of Monsters": "I think we're more afraid of our fellow man. We're more terrified of the innocent-looking neighbor who might worship a different god or who has a predilection for devouring children or who might simply want to tell us what we can do in the dark privacy of our own home. These sorts of monsters are hard to defang because you can't find them, because they aren't physically different than you or I. What makes them different is the way they think."
  
  Lastly, here's an excerpt from the Mark Teppo interview in Fantasy Magazine: "I jettisoned all of [the urban fantasy tropes] for historical occult practices, secret religious doctrines, alchemical theories, and other religious magic practices. Why? Because I couldn't sort out a worldview where vampires didn't turn us all into cattle, or we got our shit together to wipe them out. Couldn't do it. Stopped trying after a while. Though, to be fair, Markham [the protagonist in the series] is, essentially, a psychic vampire, and the soul-dead are zombies, so I haven't quite abandoned the tropes.... Ignorance is not the victor; that is certain. Ignorance is what gets Markham into trouble and what hounds him during the ten years he spends wandering. In Lightbreaker, it does come down to a faith and/or knowledge, and [which one] the reader chooses will inform how they interpret the last chapter."



• Another new title (which I also edited) is Matthew Hughes's Hespira (Night Shade Books), the final volume in his trilogy of Henghis Hapthorn adventures. Hapthorn is a "discriminator" (think Sherlock Holmes but in the style/language of Jack Vance), who is trying to survive in a world in which the age of rationalism (aka science) is succumbing to sympathetic association (aka magic). Hespira is reviewed by Andrew Wheeler, former editor of the Science Fiction Book Club. Wheeler writes: "I can't see any reason why the SF audience would avoid a writer as witty and endlessly pleasurable as Hughes, but they certainly didn't buy all that many copies of [his earlier Warner and Tor] books. But Hughes has kept writing, adding new wrinkles to his Vancean far future with each book and becoming one of the most entertaining writers the modern genre has to offer.... Again, I can be reliably counted on to call each new Matthew Hughes novel a triumph; he writes wonderful books that I enjoy massively. The Vancean flavor [has] mixed with a dash of Wodehouse, a couple of jiggers of Conan Doyle, and a shot or two of Wolfe to form a bracing cocktail that is nothing but Hughes. Hespira in particular builds on its two predecessors to make a satisfying end to a trilogy -- and what SFF reader can resist a trilogy? Hughes is the writer I invariably mention whenever the question of modern underrated writers comes up; he writes the kind of wonderful, funny, thoughtful, exciting, zippy novels that should be massively popular and winning him shelves-full of awards."



• We've all been hearing about the demise of print media -- magazines and newspapers in particular; how ad revenue has dropped 30-plus percent over the past year, thousands of newspaper and magazine employees laid off, etc. Well, here's one: Robert Feder of blogs.vocalo.org writes: "...you'd think the chief executive officer of a company struggling to emerge from bankruptcy and desperate to salvage an $8 billion buyout-gone-bad would have better things to do than pester his underlings with crazy proclamations. But in the case of Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, you'd be wrong. The man at the top of the troubled media empire took time out of his real job this week [the week of March 10] to issue a list of words and phrases -- 119 of them, to be exact -- that must never, ever be uttered by anchors or reporters on WGN-AM (720), the news/talk radio station located five floors below his office in Tribune Tower." Here are a few of those banned words: "alleged," "close proximity," "flee," "icon," "legendary," "motorist," "untimely death," "vehicle," and "youth," to name only a few of the 119 words/phrases. You will be shocked to see the everyday words on this list. (via mediabistro.com)



• NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has updated its Flickr account with some new, astounding photographs of the "Blue Marble" -- Earth. I often imagine what it would be like to be "out there," looking down. Whew.... (via @Huffingtonpost)

Mark Teppo's Codex of Souls Seeks the Light

I began writing this blog the first weekend in September, but incoming projects and deadlines prohibited me from finishing the blog post at that time. So, what follows is what I initially wrote, and then I will continue on from there.

* * *

On Tuesday I delivered the final edited manuscript for Mark Teppo's novel Heartland: The Second Book of the Codex of Souls to publisher Night Shade Books. The due date for delivery of the edited manuscript was that day, September 1, but the manuscript had in fact been completed a few days prior. I told Mark that I would sit on it until the 1st just in case he or I came up with any thoughts, issues, or last minute edits. Neither of us did, which is always a good sign.

Just as a point of information, the "Codex of Souls" is a planned ten-book series, though I believe only the first three titles, so far, have a home at Night Shade Books. Personally, I have no doubt that all ten books will assuredly see publication. Book one, Lightbreaker, was published this past June, and Heartland will be forthcoming in early 2010. Each book contains a teaser for the next title in the series; book 3, Angel Tongue, is scheduled for publication in 2011.

I've been working on Heartland for most of this past month. I read through the author's manuscript twice: making notes and minor edits the first time, then I gave the manuscript an intensive editing review the second time around -- sending the author an email as each question/concern arose. At this stage I was working on hardcopy -- I only edit on hardcopy! Once the editing and review was complete, I then keyed in all the edits and notes directly into the author's manuscript file using MS Word's "change tracking." Without "change tracking" I would be forced to deal with hardcopy from start to finish: I would have had to photocopy the marked-up pages and mail them to the author. However, "change tracking" negates the need for all of that. For those unfamiliar with "change tracking": My initial edits/changes are entered in a red font; the author's follow-up edits/changes are entered in blue. So it is easy to keep track of who entered what. Plus, anything deleted is automatically moved into a box in the right margin so one can view deletes as well as adds. And, of course, any change can be rejected by either person. Comments can also be added anywhere, when necessary, to explain edits, to ask questions/clarifications, etc. A great little tool. How did we survive without this years ago? Yeah, I know, photocopy and mail.

So far Mark and I have churned out at least 165 Heartland-related emails discussing the finer (and not so finer) points in the manuscript.

Before I proceed any further, I would like to include an excerpt here from Heartland -- just one paragraph from the hundreds of paragraphs and more than 132,000 words -- with Mark Teppo's permission, of course:

It's a funny way to remember someone: as a sensory phantom haunting you when they are gone. They become a collection of elusive details; you cannot remember them completely, and the more you struggle to put the puzzle together, the more you obsess about the gaps between the pieces. But, when you find these people again, when you crush them to you and inhale their smell, when you hear their voice, when you feel their touch, the pieces arrange themselves and you can’t fathom how you didn't see the whole picture before.

When I read words strung together into sentences to form a paragraph like this one -- well, all is right with the world. (What? You were expecting a quote of some heinous deed, or of some magickal display of power? -- Ahh, but I'm a romantic at heart.)

If the Codex of Souls series had to be classified/boxed/labeled, then I would be forced to say it is Urban Fantasy (with a strong male protagonist). But this series is so much more than that. I don't read much contemporary fantasy these days, as the stories are so overrun with romantic supernatural vamipiric zombies, but you won't find any of that in the Codex of Souls. Blue Tyson, in his mini review, called Lightbreaker "An urban fantasy novel that is a lot more Hellblazer, Mage and Highlander than it is high heels, hot pants and horizontal vampire mambo. There's even a Watcher society and sword fighting." Lupa, at Pagan Book Reviews, writes: "Teppo's story is based on Western Occultism, particularly Qabalah and other forms of ceremonial magic. To be sure, there's a lot of fantasy element to it -- souls shoving each other out of bodies with visible results, qlipothic spirits zapping rival mages -- but the author knows his stuff as far as basic Western magical theory goes."

Recently, I was interviewed by Charles Tan for his Bibliophile Stalker blog. In that interview I mention one summer during college in which I had read Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road – all in succession. If Lightbreaker had been published at that point of time in my life, the book would have fit in quite perfectly between Castaneda and Kesey. How about that for a summer's beach-reading experience!

12 Stories Do Not a Collection Make

The big announcement last month concerned my friend Alastair Reynolds, author of the superb space opera novels Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap, among others -- all part of his Inhibitors-Conjoiners (aka Revelation Space) universe. According to the announcement and mini-interview in the Guardian, Reynolds has signed an unprecedented contract with publisher Gollancz in the United Kingdom: the contract calls for ten books over a span of ten years for 1-million pounds sterling [that's $1,620,660.00 as of this writing]. Congratulations, Al!

Al and I have worked on a couple of projects together over the past few years: a limited edition chapbook novella (Turquoise Days, Golden Gryphon Press, 2002) and a short story collection (Zima Blue and Other Stories, Night Shade Books, 2006). [I'd love to link to additional information on Zima Blue but all NSB editions are out of print.] And hopefully there will be another project in the foreseeable future. If all the authors with whom I've worked, or will work, had the professionalism, moral integrity, care and respect for others that Al Reynolds displayed during these two projects, I would be in editorial hog heaven.

With this new multi-book deal, Al no longer has to worry about sample chapters and outlines and pitches for his next book contracts (at least for the next nine years), he can now devote that time to the craft of writing. And we, his readers, will continue to delight in the fruits of his labors. If you're not familiar with Alastair Reynolds's short fiction, check out his story "Spirey and the Queen" available online (included in Zima Blue); and if you're into audio, Al reads his new story "Scales," his first military SF story, as part of the original Guardian Books Podcast series.

So, you wonder, why am I spending so much time chatting about Alastair Reynolds? Because I'm going to use his collection, Zima Blue and Other Stories -- and specifically how this collection came together -- as my example in this essay on short story collections.

In recent years I have noticed a trend among "young" authors -- particularly those published by small presses, and to be even more specific, the print-on-demand (POD) small presses -- to publish a new short story collection as soon as they've accumulated (and that's the correct word I wish to use) a dozen or so stories. If the writer is sufficiently prodigious, that could easily work out to a collection (or two) a year. As a point of clarification, I use the term "young" loosely here. Author William Gibson was thirty-six years old when his first novel Neuromancer was published in 1984; Lucius Shepard was thirty-eight and Jay Lake was forty when each won the Campbell Award for best new writer. In response to an age question on his blog, John Scalzi has written an excellent essay on why new, young writers are typically in their 30s when they finally get published; he even lays out his own writing career as an example.

I realize authors need income, and if they are primarily a short story writer, then a collection of said stories is one of the few (if only) income-generating options open to them once the stories themselves have been initially published. I understand the need, and the rationale, but...

In my tenure as an editor, I have worked on twenty short story collections; not a large number in the overall scheme of things, but not too shabby either for the small press business. I am referring to the full package here: working with the author to develop the collection, selecting the stories, determining story order, editing and copyediting the stories, and whatever else was needed to create the book. Authors included Kage Baker, Michael Bishop, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert, Lucius Shepard, Jeff VanderMeer, and, of course, George Alec Effinger, plus a handful of others. And though I'm far from being an expert on story collections (every author and every book always has something new to teach me), I have had a wee bit of experience.

Often, an author and/or the author's agent would send me a manuscript consisting of a predetermined set of stories and word count. In every instance I worked with the author to change the contents list and increase the word count. This was necessary because the author and/or the agent included weak stories and insufficient word count. However, had those manuscripts been sent directly to a POD press, they undoubtedly would have been published as is; possibly with little, if any, copyediting (and certainly no editing), which, depending on the press of course, is typically the responsibility of the submitting author.

What happens is, the author floods his own market with his short fiction collections. Each collection, without doubt, contains excellent, maybe even great, stories; but each collection also contains one or more stories that should not have been included in that particular collection, or should simply not have been collected -- ever. Consequently the author (and publisher) ends up with a good collection -- but not a great collection. The collection garners a couple or so reviews if the author is lucky, but nothing memorable comes of the book, and it is all too quickly forgotten. All the author's hardcore fans will most likely purchase the book, but beyond that? Sound familiar? I'm sure if you are a reader of short fiction, and short fiction collections in particular, an author or two comes immediately to mind.

As an acquiring editor for Golden Gryphon Press, I first contacted Alastair Reynolds via email on April 16, 2001, regarding a short story collection. Al had already published about sixteen stories as well as his first novel, Revelation Space. (Second novel, Chasm City, would appear about three weeks later.) At this point in time, I had read quite a few of Al's short stories: "Digital to Analogue" (In Dreams, edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman, 1992), "Spirey and the Queen" (Interzone, June 1996), "Great Wall of Mars" (Spectrum SF #1, February 2000), "Merlin's Gun" (Interzone, May 2000), and "Hideaway" (Interzone, July 2000). There was no doubt in my mind that Alastair Reynolds was going to be one of the preeminent SF writers in the years to come, and I wanted to be the first to snag a collection of his stories. Unfortunately, I was too late...

Al responded the following day. In the email, he raved about Golden Gryphon Press books (he said that he had just obtained a copy of the Robert Reed collection, The Dragons of Spring Place). Unfortunately, Al also informed me that about a month earlier he had made a commitment to publisher Night Shade Books for a short story collection. But here's the caveat: Al told me that he suggested to Night Shade that they wait another year or two for the collection to ensure he had a "sufficiently good core of strong stories to justify a collection." So Al chose to delay his own collection by at least two years (waiting a minimum of one year and publishing the book the following year) -- even though two small presses were clamoring for a collection now -- because he wanted to ensure a quality collection. Shocking!

I've had authors turn down my solicitation for a short story collection for a variety of reasons: they had promised a collection to another publisher (others authors, in addition to Al); they planned to include a collection as part of their next contract negotiation with their NY publisher; they could make more money with another publisher; or they were just too busy now to even bother. I've had an author respond that they passed my inquiry on to their agent, who then completely ignored me -- even after follow-up emails; some professional courtesy would have been nice, even if their response was simply to tell me to just go away. But I've never had an author turn down a short story collection because they felt they didn't have enough quality fiction to be included in the book. You have to understand my surprise because the five Reynolds stories that I mentioned above totaled nearly 65,000 words. And he had another ten or so stories in addition to these. Certainly enough word count overall, and the quality of these five particular stories was not to be questioned.

My follow-up email to Al that same day was a hardcore sales pitch. I did all I could to place Golden Gryphon in the spotlight and even suggested two different collections to Al so that both publishers would be satisfied: one collection now -- for Golden Gryphon, of course -- and a second collection in a couple years for Night Shade. Al's response? He still insisted that he didn't have enough strong stories and that he wanted to wait for another year or two, but he did like the idea of two collections, broken out by his "future history" stories (a la Revelation Space) and his other stories. I expressed my enthusiasm for either collection -- though I had a definite preference at the time for the "future history" stories. [Remember this two-collection idea for later reference.]

Fortunately, Al and I continued our email dialogue. But I'm no fool, and I anticipated Al's increasing popularity in the field, so in a May 10, 2001 email, I posed the following scenario: In a year or two from now, when Al (and Al's agent) is negotiating a new contract, his UK publisher, Gollancz, asks for a short story collection. What does he do now that he has already committed (albeit only verbally, but one trusts Al on his word) to a Night Shade Books collection? And though I didn't bring this point up, I was also concerned that Al's contract with Gollancz included first refusal rights, which would mean they would have first dibs on any collection proposal. That collection might not interest them now, with Al having published only two novels as of 2001; but what about one or two years from now? Thus my concern for delaying said collection.

In Al's response the following day, he wrote: "The points you make are good, and I can appreciate your argument about moving sooner rather than later. From what I can gather, though, there's not much enthusiasm among the mainstream UK publishers for short fiction collections, so I suspect this won't be that big an issue. Gollancz have never once mooted the possibility, or showed any interest in my non-novel activities. I suspect they'll be happy just to deal with novels from me (and if the current book stiffs, they may not want to talk novels either...!)."

I, in turn, responded to Al that I think he underestimates himself, given his newness in the field (only two novels to date), and referred to UK authors Stephen Baxter and Greg Egan (actually Australian but published in the UK), both of whom have had highly touted short story collections published by "mainstream UK publishers." Regardless, Al and I agreed to postpone any further discussion on a collection until after he completed work on his third novel.

Copyediting Par Excellence

I attended MidSouthCon near Memphis earlier this month, to help launch and promote Andrew Fox's new novel, The Good Humor Man from Tachyon Publications. MidSouthCon planned a "writers track" this year, and the programming staff asked if I would do a workshop, lasting one and a half hours (in addition to a few other panels). I agreed, and then had to think of an appropriate subject. Something that author Mark Teppo had said, when he and I were laying the ground rules for working together on his novel Lightbreaker last year, came to mind. I edit on hardcopy -- that's just how I work; however, when I work directly with an author, I then re-enter all my edits and copyedits from the hardcopy into the author's formatted manuscript file using MS Word's Change Tracking; with Change Tracking the author can easily see both the before and after, and I can enter comment boxes where needed as well. Consequently there is no hardcopy to photocopy and mail (and thus no added expense); the author never sees my hardcopy, only the marked-up e-file. When I explained the process to Mark and asked if he was okay with this, he responded: Track Changes is perfect, and I’m glad that I don’t have to actually go figure out what copyediting marks are. :) [The smiley face was included in Mark's response!] [Note: more blogging to come on Mark Teppo's Lightbreaker, tentatively scheduled for publication from Night Shade Books on April 20.]

So, for MidSouthCon, I proposed a workshop entitled "Learn Copyeditting four Fun and Proft" (typos intentional), with the following description:

You've just received the marked-up galleys of your novel from the publisher. You have less than a week to review these pages and provide feedback. There's so much red ink on the galleys that it looks like the copyeditor was hideously attacked during the editing process! Just what do all those red lines and characters mean?

I created a three-part, sixty-five-page computer presentation, that included ten hands-on exercises for the workshop participants, along with real examples taken directly from the books I have edited over the years -- all of this, as it turned out, for four and a half people (the "one-half" being the person who arrived a half-hour late and left a half-hour early). That was the extent of my workshop participants. So, I thought that I would salvage some of the work I put into this workshop by sharing the finer points of my discussion with readers of this blog.